[caption id=”attachment_145737″ align=”aligncenter” width=”1024″] In this Aug. 20, 2015, photo, Republican presidential candidate, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, takes a question during a town hall campaign stop in Keene, N.H. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)
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Jeb Bush finds nothing offensive in the term “anchor babies,” though he didn’t use it as his “own language,” he claimed.
On Wednesday, Bush used the term when discussing Donald Trump on a radio interview, then expanded on the term after a town hall.
According to The Washington Post, Bush implied that Democrats were responsible for saying it’s a loaded term.
“What I said is that it’s commonly referred to that. I didn’t use it as my own language. You want to get to the policy for a second? I think that people born in this country ought to be American citizens,” Bush said.
The full quote, as Politico reported, is “if there’s abuse, if people are bringing — pregnant women are coming in to have babies simply because they can do it, then there ought to be greater enforcement … “that’s [the] legitimate side of this. Better enforcement so that you don’t have these, you know, ‘anchor babies’, as they’re described, coming into the country.”
In his defense, The Washington Post reviewed comments that Bush has made about immigration and did not find an instance of Bush using the term. Bush has previously talked about how Republicans need to soften their rhetoric on immigration to appear less angry and appeal to immigrants and especially Latinos and Hispanics, groups stereotyped by the term.
Bush has long been a voice among Republican leaders calling for immigration reform and a stronger focus on solutions to fix immigration.
